For Air Traffic Trainees, Games With a Serious Purpose

Nearly two-thirds of the Federal Aviation Administration's 15,000 current air traffic controllers will have retired by 2017. The mandatory retirement age is 56, and controllers were hired by the thousands in the early '80s after President Ronald Reagan fired the previous controllers for going on strike.

Thus, a whole bunch of trainees need to get up to speed, in an industry that hasn't needed to train many new employees for decades. To meet this challenge, the FAA is turning to games with a serious purpose — what one instructor has dubbed "a big Xbox":

Officials say they are hoping that the use of the simulators will cut training time 20 percent to 60 percent. Training costs average $74,000 a controller but vary widely, being higher for the busiest, most complex airports.

The agency has used simulators for radar training for years, but it recently began installing simulators for control towers. O’Hare International Airport in Chicago has one, and others will be scattered around the country.

At the academy, six simulators run about 18 hours a day, but the F.A.A. also continues to use its old training method, built around a plywood airport model on a table in the middle of a classroom.

Trainees simulate flights by carrying model planes around the room and following instructions from a controller. Masking tape on the floor, marked with handwritten numbers, represent miles from the end of the runway.
[...]
The screening process for candidates has gone high-tech, too. In the 1990s the F.A.A. developed a six-hour computerized aptitude test that it refines from time to time. Recruits must answer geometry questions and solve math problems in their heads — for example, if a plane travels a certain number of miles in 90 minutes, what is its groundspeed, in miles per hour?

Then come game-like tests, designed by psychologists. In one, a bit like Tetris or Frogger, three parallel belts, running at different speeds, drop colored letters toward the bottom of the screen. The test-taker must try to grab each letter before it drops, and put it in a bin of the appropriate color. The player also has to drag the bins into place, and when the supply runs low, order more bins.

The hard part comes when the screen disappears and the computer asks questions like: How many bins were in use? How full were they? What letters were still on the belts?

Scoring well on the test is supposed to reveal the qualities that make a good air traffic controller, including the ability to work under pressure and maintain “situational awareness.”

Another game simulates actual air traffic. A screen shows a box that holds two airports, each with a single runway, useable in a single direction. The box also has four exits. Planes appear randomly, each bound for an airport or an exit.

The controller must assign the planes a speed, an altitude and a heading. The planes are allowed to exit only at high altitude, and to land only from low altitude and low speed.

When the game ends, the computer calculates how long the planes flew compared to a theoretical minimum, how many made it through the correct gates, how many crashed into the walls at the edges of the box and how many were directed too close to one another.

The test is intended to measure short-term and long-term memory, thinking ahead, multitasking, flexibility, tolerance for interruptions, and composure.

Academy students are also given a hyperactive version of Pac-Man to play in their spare time. The idea is to keep students’ skills sharp, instructors say, and hone their ability to watch several targets at a time.

Are Too Many People Going to College?

Are Too Many People Going to College?, Charles Murray asks:

Specifically: When College Board researchers defined “college readiness” as the SAT score that is associated with a 65 percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average in college during the freshman year, and then applied those criteria (hardly demanding in an era of soft courses and grade inflation) to the freshmen in a sample of 41 major colleges and universities, the threshold “college readiness” score was found to be 1180 on the combined SAT math and verbal tests. It is a score that only about 10 percent of American 18-year-olds would achieve if they all took the SAT, in an age when more than 30 percent of 18-year-olds go to college.

Should all of those who do have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? It depends. Suppose we have before us a young woman who is in the 98th percentile of academic ability and wants to become a lawyer and eventually run for political office. To me, it seems essential that she spend her undergraduate years getting a rigorous liberal education. Apart from a liberal education’s value to her, the nation will benefit. Everything she does as an attorney or as an elected official should be informed by the kind of wisdom that a rigorous liberal education can encourage. It is appropriate to push her into that kind of undergraduate program.

But the only reason we can get away with pushing her is that the odds are high that she will enjoy it. The odds are high because she is good at this sort of thing — it’s no problem for her to read On Liberty or Paradise Lost. It’s no problem for her to come up with an interesting perspective on what she’s read and weave it into a term paper. And because she’s good at it, she is also likely to enjoy it. It is one of Aristotle’s central themes in his discussion of human happiness, a theme that John Rawls later distilled into what he called the Aristotelian Principle: “Other things equal, human beings enjoy the exercise of the irrealized capacities (their innate or trained abilities), and this enjoyment increases the more the capacity is realized, or the greater its complexity.” And so it comes to pass that those who take the hardest majors and who enroll in courses that look most like an old fashioned liberal education are concentrated among the students in the top percentiles of academic ability. Getting a liberal education consists of dealing with complex intellectual material day after day, and dealing with complex intellectual material is what students in the top few percentiles are really good at, in the same way that other people are really good at cooking or making pottery. For these students, doing it well is fun.

Every percentile down the ability ladder — and this applies to all abilities, not just academic — the probability that a person will enjoy the hardest aspects of an activity goes down as well. Students at the 80th percentile of academic ability are still smart kids, but the odds that they will respond to a course that assigns Mill or Milton are considerably lower than the odds that a student in the top few percentiles will respond. Virtue has nothing to do it. Maturity has nothing to do with it. Appreciation of the value of a liberal education has nothing to do with it. The probability that a student will enjoy Paradise Lost goes down as his linguistic ability goes down, but so does the probability that he works on double acrostic puzzles in his spare time or regularly plays online Scrabble, and for the identical reason. The lower down the linguistic ladder he is, the less fun such activities are.

And so we return to the question: Should all of those who have the academic ability to absorb a college-level liberal education get one? If our young woman is at the 80th percentile of linguistic ability, should she be pushed to do so? She has enough intellectual capacity, if she puts her mind to it and works exceptionally hard.

The answer is no. If she wants to, fine. But she probably won’t, and there’s no way to force her. Try to force her (for example, by setting up a demanding core curriculum), and she will transfer to another school, because she is in college for vocational training. She wants to write computer code. Start a business. Get a job in television. She uses college to take vocational courses that pertain to her career interests. A large proportion of people who are theoretically able to absorb a liberal education have no interest in doing so.

And reasonably so. Seen dispassionately, getting a traditional liberal education over four years is an odd way to enjoy spending one’s time. Not many people enjoy reading for hour after hour, day after day, no matter what the material may be. To enjoy reading On Liberty and its ilk — and if you’re going to absorb such material, you must in some sense enjoy the process — is downright peculiar. To be willing to spend many more hours writing papers and answers to exam questions about that material approaches masochism.

We should look at the kind of work that goes into acquiring a liberal education at the college level in the same way that we look at the grueling apprenticeship that goes into becoming a master chef: something that understandably attracts only a few people.

Further, brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete:

The physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learning, and only a college faculty and student body provided the economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second, scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction between teachers and students, and physical proximity was the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-mortar campus are fading fast.

The real goal of college, for most people, is to get a good job that pays well:

When high-school graduates think that obtaining a B.A. will help them get a higher- paying job, they are only narrowly correct. Economists have established beyond doubt that people with B.A.s earn more on average than people without them. But why does the B.A. produce that result? For whom does the B.A. produce that result? For some jobs, the economic premium for a degree is produced by the actual education that has gone into getting the degree. Lawyers, physicians, and engineers can earn their high incomes only by deploying knowledge and skills that take years to acquire, and degrees in law, medicine, and engineering still signify competence in those knowledges and skills. But for many other jobs, the economic premium for the B.A. is created by a brutal fact of life about the American job market: Employers do not even interview applicants who do not hold a B.A. Even more brutal, the advantage conferred by the B.A. often has nothing to do with the content of the education. Employers do not value what the student learned, just that the student has a degree.

Employers value the B.A. because it is a no-cost (for them) screening device for academic ability and perseverance. The more people who go to college, the more sense it makes for employers to require a B.A. When only a small percentage of people got college degrees, employers who required a B.A. would have been shutting themselves off from access to most of the talent. With more than a third of 23-year-olds now getting a B.A., many employers can reasonably limit their hiring pool to college graduates because bright and ambitious high-school graduates who can go to college usually do go to college. An employer can believe that exceptions exist but rationally choose not to expend time and money to identify them. Knowing this, large numbers of students are in college to buy their admission ticket — the B.A.

Most people need a certification, not a degree.

India's Cram-School Confidential

You're probably familiar with Japan's tradition of "cram schools" for college-entrance exams. Korea has the same thing. Perhaps you haven't heard of India's Cram-School Capital, the town of Kota:

More than 40,000 students show up in the arid state of Rajasthan every year, looking to attend one of the 100-plus coaching schools here. These intensive programs, which are separate from regular high school, prepare students for college-entrance exams. In Kota, most of the schools focus on the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology.

The seven IITs nationwide are statistically tougher to get into than Harvard or Cambridge. While around 310,000 students took the entrance exam this April, only the top 8,600 were accepted. A whopping one-third of those winners in the current academic year passed through Kota's cramming regimen.

"If we stayed at home, we just wouldn't be able to study enough," says Mr. Agarwal as he takes a break from lessons. "If you don't study hard, you won't get admission."

Today, he starts studying at 7 a.m., works on practice problems until noon. After lunch, he goes to class, where he gets the answers to the problems, gets home around 8 p.m. and does homework until midnight.

From 12 years onwards you learn differently

From 12 years onwards you learn differently than in your earlier years:

Eight-year-old children have a radically different learning strategy from twelve-year-olds and adults. Eight-year-olds learn primarily from positive feedback ('Well done!'), whereas negative feedback ('Got it wrong this time') scarcely causes any alarm bells to ring. Twelve-year-olds are better able to process negative feedback, and use it to learn from their mistakes. Adults do the same, but more efficiently.

The switch in learning strategy has been demonstrated in behavioural research, which shows that eight-year-olds respond disproportionately inaccurately to negative feedback. But the switch can also be seen in the brain, as developmental psychologist Dr Eveline Crone and her colleagues from the Leiden Brain and Cognition Lab discovered using fMRI research. The difference can be observed particularly in the areas of the brain responsible for cognitive control. These areas are located in the cerebral cortex.

In children of eight and nine, these areas of the brain react strongly to positive feedback and scarcely respond at all to negative feedback. But in children of 12 and 13, and also in adults, the opposite is the case. Their 'control centres' in the brain are more strongly activated by negative feedback and much less by positive feedback.

(Hat tip to FuturePundit.)

American Revolutionary

Quiet Boston scholar Gene Sharp is, in fact, an American Revolutionary:

In his writings, Mr. Sharp teased out common principles that make nonviolent resistance successful, creating a broad road map for activists looking to destabilize authoritarian regimes. Mr. Sharp's magnum opus, the 902-page "Politics of Nonviolent Action," was published in 1973. But the main source of his success is his 90-page "From Dictatorship to Democracy."

This slim volume offers concise advice on how to plan a successful opposition campaign, along with a list of historically tested tactics for rattling a dictatorial regime. Aimed at no particular country, and easily downloadable from the Internet, the booklet has found universal appeal among opposition activists around the globe.

Though he warns readers that resistance may provoke violent crackdowns and will take careful planning to succeed, Mr. Sharp writes that any dictatorship will eventually collapse if its subjects refuse to obey.

He offers a list of 198 methods of nonviolent action, like the staging of mock elections to poke fun at problems like vote-rigging, using funerals to make political statements and adopting symbolic colors, a la Orange Revolution in the Ukraine. Less conventional tactics include skywriting political messages and "protest disrobings."

In Zimbabwe, opposition activist Magodonga Mahlangu has organized the tract's translation into two main local languages. In Russia, opposition activist Oleg Kozlovsky estimates he and his colleagues have used about 30 of 198 protest methods listed in Mr. Sharp's booklet. Venezuelan student leader Yon Goicoechea says Mr. Sharp's work inspired him to think creatively of ways to carry out antigovernment protests: Activists once tied themselves to the stairs of a government building and have staged street theater to mock constitutional changes.

He's not the only academic promoting revolution. MIT's OpenCourseWare includes course 21H.001 How to Stage a Revolution, taught by Professors William Broadhead, Meg Jacobs, Peter Perdue, and Jeffrey Ravel.

College Panel Calls for Less Focus on SATs

Unsurprisingly, a college panel calls for less focus on SATs — and more focus on, well, I think you can guess:

Mr. Fitzsimmons’s group, which was convened by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, also expresses concerns “that test scores appear to calcify differences based on class, race/ethnicity and parental educational attainment.” The report calls on admissions officials to be aware of such differences and to ensure that differences not related to a student’s ability to succeed academically be “mitigated in the admission process.”

“Society likes to think that the SAT measures people’s ability or merit,” Mr. Fitzsimmons said. “But no one in college admissions who visits the range of secondary schools we visit, and goes to the communities we visit — where you see the contrast between opportunities and fancy suburbs and some of the high schools that aren’t so fancy — can come away thinking that standardized tests can be a measure of someone’s true worth or ability.”

What's amusing is that they attack the SAT, because students spend so much time "gaming" it, and recommend using the so-called achievement tests, which aren't gamed as much, as a substitute — ignoring the fact that any alternative will start getting gamed as soon as it replaces the SAT.

The Tell-All Campus Tour

In The Tell-All Campus Tour, Jonathan Dee explains how Jordan Goldman got his Web 2.0 company, Unigo, off the ground:

With no money, no contacts and no business education whatsoever, Goldman began where any 21st-century self-starter would: “I Google-searched ‘business plan,’ and I found one and just plugged my own words into it. Then it wound up that Wesleyan has an alumni database, and so I looked for people who worked in finance and who graduated 10 or more years before I did. I e-mailed about 500 people, and I just said: ‘Look, I have this idea. What do I do now? What comes next?’ It was a fairly untraditional fund-raising process.”

Actually, with the exception of the bit about Google, it was as traditional as can be, but given that he was 23, Goldman can be excused for thinking that he discovered the Old Boy Network. About 50 Wesleyan alums answered his e-mail messages, and one of those replies — from Frank Sica, a former president of Soros Private Funds Management — was the stuff of drama.

“He said, ‘I live in Bronxville,’ ” Goldman recounted. “ ‘At 7:30 I order my eggs at this diner. I’m done by 8. Come up to the diner and tell me about your idea, and I’ll give you until I’m done with my eggs.’ ” Armed with only his idea and the ability to talk a blue streak about it, Goldman set his alarm and took a train to that diner. No one who has ever met Goldman would have any trouble guessing that by the time Sica was finished with his eggs that day, he was on his way to becoming the young man’s lead investor.

Now Goldman goes to work every day on Park Avenue, in an office with an interior window through which he can keep tabs on his 25 employees, nearly all of them even younger than he. This month his Web site, called Unigo.com — a free, gigantic, student-generated guide to North American colleges for prospective applicants and their families — went live for the benefit of tens of thousands of trepidatious high-school students as they try to figure out where and how to go to college. Not coincidentally, it also aims to siphon away a few million dollars from the slow-adapting publishers of those elephantine college guidebooks that have been a staple of the high-school experience for decades.

A New View On TV

Economic researchers present A New View On TV:

The variation Mr. Gentzkow and Mr. Shapiro exploited was the timing of the introduction of TV into different cities. Television began taking off in the U.S. in 1946, after a wartime ban on TV production was lifted. But the Federal Communications Commission stopped granting new commercial television licenses from September 1948 to April 1952 while it made changes in allocating broadcast spectrum. There was a long lag between when some cities got television and when others did.

The economists then looked at results of a survey of 800 U.S. schools that administered tests to 346,662 sixth-grade, ninth-grade and 12th-grade students in 1965. Their finding: Adjusting for differences in household income, parents' educational background and other factors, children who lived in cities that gave them more exposure to television in early childhood performed better on the tests than those with less exposure.

Naturally, TV helps children from non-English-speaking families the most.

Perhaps Everything Bad is Good for You?

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

Number Sense

Most animals have a basic number sense, allowing them, at a glance, to estimate the number of, say, prey animals before them:

The Johns Hopkins team wondered whether this basic, seemingly innate number sense had any bearing on the formal mathematics that people learn in school. So the researchers asked 64 14-year-olds to look at flashing groups of yellow and blue dots on a computer screen and estimate which dots were more numerous. Though most of the children easily arrived at the correct answer when there were (for example) only 10 blue dots and 25 yellow ones, some had difficulty when the number of dots in each set was closer together. Those results helped the researchers ascertain the accuracy of each child's individual "number sense."

They then examined the teenagers' record of performance in school math all the way back through kindergarten, and found that students who exhibited more acute number sense had performed at a higher level in mathematics than those who showed weaker number sense, even controlling for general intelligence and other factors.

(Hat tip to Al Fin.)

EF vs. IQ

Al Fin looks at EF vs. IQ — where EF stands for executive function, which has two facets:

1. metacognition – problem solving, planning, concept formation, strategy development and implementation, controlling attention, working memory; handled in the dorsolateral prefrontal areas
2. motivation – fulfilling biological needs according to some existing conditions; associated with the orbitofrontal and medial frontal areas

Executive function is highly heritable, but special curricula to train EF have been developed:

The EF curriculum has many strands, but here are a few just to give a flavor. Instead of keeping the classroom quiet, kids are actually taught and encouraged to talk to themselves, privately but aloud, as a way of helping them exert mental control. In one exercise, for example, the kids have to match their movements to symbols. When the teacher holds up a circle they clap, with a triangle they hop, and so forth. The kids are taught to talk themselves through the mental exercise: "OK, now clap." "Twirl now." This has been shown to flex and enhance the brain's ability to switch gears, to suppress one piece of information and sub in a new one. It takes discipline; it's the elementary school equivalent of saying "I really need stop thinking about next week's vacation and focus on this report."

Here's another example from the classroom. Children tell stories to one another, but kids being kids, they all want to be the storyteller; none wants to just sit and listen. But the reality is that only one can tell a story at a time, so the designated listeners hold a picture of an ear, a prop to remind them that they are waiting their turn to talk. This helps them learn to control their natural instinct to talk out of turn. Eventually the props and private chatter are not needed, but in the beginning they help cognitively immature children stretch their executive muscles.

Dramatic role playing is a cornerstone of the EF philosophy. The preschoolers, all four and five years old, actually design the play's action by themselves. For example: "Let's pretend you're the mommy and I'm the baby. I'll get sick, and you'll need to take me to the doctor." Then they act it out, solving problems along the way. The idea is that play of this kind promotes the internalization of rules and expectations and demands mental discipline to stay in character — all cognitive challenges. Importantly, these exercises are not tacked on as a separate teaching, but rather are integrated into every activity of the child's day, from reading to math.

This is a vast oversimplification of a curriculum that has taken years to develop and is grounded in rigorous scientific studies of children's brain development. One concern of EF proponents is that dramatic play and clapping games will seem frivolous, a distraction from drilling kids in fractions and irregular verbs. But Diamond's results say otherwise. As she reported at the recent convention of the Association for Psychological Science in Chicago, kids in both traditional and experimental classrooms were given a battery of EF tests following two years of preschool. The tests were very difficult cognitive challenges that require kids to inhibit their automatic responses. The EF-trained children outperformed the traditionally educated kids on every single test. In fact, the differences were so dramatic after one year that some school officials opted out of the experiment to give all the kids the benefit of EF training.

But there's more. Psychologist Clancy Blair of Pennsylvania State University has shown that preschoolers with sharper executive capability also outperform their more traditional peers in basic skills, especially mathematics, when they hit kindergarten. In other words, as counterintuitive as it seems, early exposure to dramatic play and cognitive games better prepares kids for mastery of traditional academics.

Apparently EF and IQ are two great tastes that taste great together:

In this study 141 healthy children between the ages of three and five years took a battery of psychological tests that measured their IQs and executive functioning. Researchers found that a child whose IQ and executive functioning were both above average was three times more likely to succeed in math than a kid who simply had a high IQ.

Some tests of executive function, like the "backward digit span" test, can be used as training tools for preschool students:

Person A recites a string of numbers, like 3, 6, 10, and person B has to respond with the same string, only in reverse order: 10, 6, 3. This task requires one to restrain his or her automatic inclination to mimic person A (inhibitory control), but also requires keeping the actual numbers in mind (working memory).

Some training tools are more sophisticated:

Inspired by skills training of monkeys, Michael Posner and Mary Rothbart at the University of Oregon have developed a five-day computer-based attention-training program for young children. After the training, six-year-olds show a pattern of activity in the anterior cingulate — a banana-shaped brain region that is ground zero for executive attention — similar to that of adults, along with a slight IQ boost and a marked gain in executive attention.

How Videogames Blind Us With Science

In How Videogames Blind Us With Science, Clive Thompson argues that the same kids who sleep through their science classes enthusiastically use the scientific method to succeed in gaming:

A few years ago, Constance Steinkuehler — a game academic at the University of Wisconsin — was spending 12 hours a day playing Lineage, the online world game. She was, as she puts it, a "siege princess," running 150-person raids on hellishly difficult bosses. Most of her guild members were teenage boys.

But they were pretty good at figuring out how to defeat the bosses. One day she found out why. A group of them were building Excel spreadsheets into which they'd dump all the information they'd gathered about how each boss behaved: What potions affected it, what attacks it would use, with what damage, and when. Then they'd develop a mathematical model to explain how the boss worked — and to predict how to beat it.

Often, the first model wouldn't work very well, so the group would argue about how to strengthen it. Some would offer up new data they'd collected, and suggest tweaks to the model. "They'd be sitting around arguing about what model was the best, which was most predictive," Steinkuehler recalls.

That's when it hit her: The kids were practicing science.

They were using the scientific method. They'd think of a hypothesis — This boss is really susceptible to fire spells — and then collect evidence to see if the hypothesis was correct. If it wasn't, they'd improve it until it accounted for the observed data.

This led Steinkuehler to a fascinating and provocative conclusion: Videogames are becoming the new hotbed of scientific thinking for kids today.

This makes sense if you think about it for a second. After all, what is science? It's a technique for uncovering the hidden rules that govern the world. And videogames are simulated worlds that kids are constantly trying to master. Lineage and World of Warcraft aren't "real" world, of course, but they are consistent — the behavior of the environment and the creatures in it are governed by hidden and generally unchanging rules, encoded by the game designers. In the process of learning a game, gamers try to deduce those rules.

This leads them, without them even realizing it, to the scientific method.

This is what Steinkuehler reports in a research paper — "Scientific Habits of Mind in Virtual Worlds" (.pdf) — that she will publish in this spring's Journal of Science Education and Technology. She and her co-author, Sean Duncan, downloaded the content of 1,984 posts in 85 threads in a discussion board for players of World of Warcraft.

What did they find? Only a minority of the postings were "banter" or idle chat. In contrast, a majority — 86 percent — were aimed specifically at analyzing the hidden ruleset of games.

More than half the gamers used "systems-based reasoning" — analyzing the game as a complex, dynamic system. And one-tenth actually constructed specific models to explain the behavior of a monster or situation; they would often use their model to generate predictions. Meanwhile, one-quarter of the commentors would build on someone else's previous argument, and another quarter would issue rebuttals of previous arguments and models.

Teach the Controversy

Teach the Controversy with intelligently designed t-shirts by Jeremy Kalgreen:



(Hat tip to Mike.)

Is U.C.L.A. Illegally Using Race-Based Affirmative Action in Admissions?

Is U.C.L.A. Illegally Using Race-Based Affirmative Action in Admissions? Steven D. Levitt's friend and co-author, Tim Groseclose, a professor of political science at U.C.L.A., thinks so:

Groseclose was a member of U.C.L.A.’s Committee on Undergraduate Admissions and Relations With Schools until yesterday, when he resigned from the committee in a very public way and released an 89-page report documenting what he calls “malfeasance” and an “accompanying cover-up.”

The gist of Groseclose’s allegations is that Proposition 209 prohibits public institutions in California from considering race, sex, or ethnicity, but that U.C.L.A. nonetheless uses such information in admissions decisions.
[...]
Indeed, it seems that the adoption of the “holistic” approach to judging applications was designed precisely to accomplish that goal, as David Leonhardt has written about previously.

Statistics suggest the holistic approach did lead to a big jump in enrollment by African-Americans at U.C.L.A., which was accompanied by a sharp decline in the S.A.T. scores of the African-American students admitted.

Protect Our Kids from Preschool

Protect Our Kids from Preschool, Shikha Dalmia and Lisa Snell implore:

If anything, preschool may do lasting damage to many children. A 2005 analysis by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, found that kindergartners with 15 or more hours of preschool every week were less motivated and more aggressive in class. Likewise, Canada's C.D. Howe Institute found a higher incidence of anxiety, hyperactivity and poor social skills among kids in Quebec after universal preschool.

The only preschool programs that seem to do more good than harm are very intense interventions targeted toward severely disadvantaged kids. A 1960s program in Ypsilanti, Mich., a 1970s program in Chapel Hill, N.C., and a 1980s program in Chicago, Ill., all report a net positive effect on adult crime, earnings, wealth and welfare dependence for participants. But the kids in the Michigan program had low IQs and all came from very poor families, often with parents who were drug addicts and neglectful.

Even so, the economic gains of these programs are grossly exaggerated. For instance, Prof. Heckman calculated that the Michigan program produced a 16-cent return on every dollar spent — not even remotely close to the $10 return that Mr. Obama and his fellow advocates bandy about.

(Hat tip to Arnold Kling.)

New Push to Lower the Drinking Age Clashes With Teen Driving Safety

Recently, more than 100 college presidents signed the Amethyst Initiative , calling for "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21 year old drinking age." But this new push to re-lower the drinking age clashes with teen driving safety:

For 24 years, the U.S. government, through its control of road construction money, has enforced a minimum drinking age of 21 years old. States that refused to comply can lose 10% of their federal road money. Since 1988, all 50 states have toed the line, enforcing a prohibition against drinking for people between 18 and 21 who are in nearly every other way legal adults.

During roughly the same period, from 1982 to about 1994, the number of annual alcohol-related traffic fatalities among people ages 16 to 20 began to decline from about 5,200 a year in 1982 to about 2,100 in 1994, according to data from the U.S. government's Fatal Accident Reporting System. Since the mid-1990s, the number of alcohol-related crashes among drivers ages 16 to 20 has leveled out. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, using its own counting methods to tally crashes involving drivers with blood alcohol levels above the current 0.08 legal limit, says that in 1996, 1,359 drivers between ages 16 and 20 died in alcohol-related crashes. In 2006, 1,350 teen drivers died in crashes linked to drinking.

If our actual concern is college-age kids drinking and driving, then it seems like our focus should be on drinking and driving — not one or the other.

For instance, in a city with well-developed mass transit, like New York, how dangerous is it to let 18-year-olds drink (legally)?

If you know college kids are going to drink, and your chief concern is drunk-driving, why not license residence halls to operate pubs? Keep an eye on drinking and know that no one is going to drive home drunk.

But that's assuming our concern really is drunk-driving.

They need a certification, not a degree

For most people, college is a waste of time, Charles Murray notes. Imagine what you'd think if we had no system of post-secondary education, and someone suggested this:

First, we will set up a single goal to represent educational success, which will take four years to achieve no matter what is being taught. We will attach an economic reward to it that seldom has anything to do with what has been learned. We will urge large numbers of people who do not possess adequate ability to try to achieve the goal, wait until they have spent a lot of time and money, and then deny it to them. We will stigmatize everyone who doesn't meet the goal. We will call the goal a "BA."

Murray argues that young people entering the job market should have a known, trusted measure of their qualifications they can carry into job interviews — a certification, not a degree:

The model is the CPA exam that qualifies certified public accountants. The same test is used nationwide. It is thorough — four sections, timed, totaling 14 hours. A passing score indicates authentic competence (the pass rate is below 50%). Actual scores are reported in addition to pass/fail, so that employers can assess where the applicant falls in the distribution of accounting competence. You may have learned accounting at an anonymous online university, but your CPA score gives you a way to show employers you're a stronger applicant than someone from an Ivy League school.

Murray sees many advantages to certification:

Under a certification system, four years is not required, residence is not required, expensive tuitions are not required, and a degree is not required. Equal educational opportunity means, among other things, creating a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference. Substituting certifications for degrees would be a big step in that direction.

The incentives are right. Certification tests would provide all employers with valuable, trustworthy information about job applicants. They would benefit young people who cannot or do not want to attend a traditional four-year college. They would be welcomed by the growing post-secondary online educational industry, which cannot offer the halo effect of a BA from a traditional college, but can realistically promise their students good training for a certification test — as good as they are likely to get at a traditional college, for a lot less money and in a lot less time.

Certification tests would disadvantage just one set of people: Students who have gotten into well-known traditional schools, but who are coasting through their years in college and would score poorly on a certification test. Disadvantaging them is an outcome devoutly to be wished.

I think he underestimates how many people do not want a society in which it's what you know that makes the difference — and how many benefit from government subsidies for "education" without any objective measure of learning or competence. The American university system is an enormous special interest with unbelievable influence.

5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do

Gever Tulley runs the Tinkering School, where kids as young as 7 build projects with power tools. He's working on a book called 50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do, but at a recent TED conference he presented just 5 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do:



(Hat tip to GeekDad.)

The Biggest Issue

In his recent op-ed piece, The Biggest Issue, David Brooks asserts that the U.S. became the leading economic power of the 20th century because of its "ferocious belief" that people have the power to transform their own lives, which led to an "unparalleled commitment" to education, hard work and economic freedom:

Between 1870 and 1950, the average American’s level of education rose by 0.8 years per decade. In 1890, the average adult had completed about 8 years of schooling. By 1900, the average American had 8.8 years. By 1910, it was 9.6 years, and by 1960, it was nearly 14 years. [...] Educational levels were rising across the industrialized world, but the U.S. had at least a 35-year advantage on most of Europe. In 1950, no European country enrolled 30 percent of its older teens in full-time secondary school. In the U.S., 70 percent of older teens were in school.

Brooks calls this a "happy era" and laments that it ended around 1970, but he seems to assume that all education is good education, and that any additional education must lead inexorably to economic progress — or at least to capturing a bigger piece of the pie:

Goldin and Katz describe a race between technology and education. The pace of technological change has been surprisingly steady. In periods when educational progress outpaces this change, inequality narrows. The market is flooded with skilled workers, so their wages rise modestly. In periods, like the current one, when educational progress lags behind technological change, inequality widens. The relatively few skilled workers command higher prices, while the many unskilled ones have little bargaining power.

This implies to me that a handful of remarkable technologists move us all forward, but more-educated workers capture more of the surplus than unskilled workers.

Anyway, I've commented on James Heckman's Schools, Skills, and Synapses (PDF) before. Brooks emphasizes a few of Heckman's points:

Heckman points out that big gaps in educational attainment are present at age 5. Some children are bathed in an atmosphere that promotes human capital development and, increasingly, more are not. By 5, it is possible to predict, with depressing accuracy, who will complete high school and college and who won’t.

I.Q. matters, but Heckman points to equally important traits that start and then build from those early years: motivation levels, emotional stability, self-control and sociability.

I'm not sure how Brooks can read Heckman's work and emphasize the "depressing accuracy" of educational predictions and still draw the policy conclusions he draws:

It’s not globalization or immigration or computers per se that widen inequality. It’s the skills gap. Boosting educational attainment at the bottom is more promising than trying to reorganize the global economy.

How do we "boost educational attainment at the bottom" when educational attainment is "depressingly" easy to predict by age 5?

The Mystery of “b := (b = false)”

Stuart Reges explains The Mystery of “b := (b = false)” — and a few other "powerhouse questions" on the computer science advanced placement exam:

Most multiple-choice questions on the exam had few significant correlations with other parts of the exam. But a small set of five questions had a nontrivial correlation with many parts of the test. One question in particular demonstrated such correlations. It asked about the effect of the assignment statement “b := (b = false)” for a boolean variable b. One interpretation of this data is that these questions are testing general programming aptitude.
[...]
Computer Science educators have for years complained that introductory courses seem to be divided between a group of students who “get it” and a group of students who do not. Donald Knuth has written about this phenomenon:

“Educators of computer science have repeatedly observed that only about 2 out of every 100 students enrolling in introductory programming classes really resonate with the subject and seem to be natural-born computer scientists…I conclude that roughly 2% of all people ‘think algorithmically,’ in the sense that they can reason rapidly about algorithmic processes.”

[...]
It was an unpublished study conducted by Gerrit DeYoung in which he found that a measure of quantitative reasoning was not a predictor of success in a course for CS majors but was a reasonable predictor of success in a course for nonmajors. Knuth’s tentative conclusion was that there is some kind of CS aptitude that is not measured by standard tests of quantitative reasoning and that students who lacked that ability were instead relying on general quantitative aptitude.
[...]
What exactly do the powerhouse questions look like? Let’s explore question 23 in depth because it had the most nontrivial correlations. The exact text of the question is reproduced below:

23. If b is a Boolean variable, then the statement b := (b = false) has what effect?
(A) It causes a compile-time error message.
(B) It causes a run-time error message.
(C) It causes b to have value false regardless of its value just before the statement was executed.
(D) It always changes the value of b.
(E) It changes the value of b if and only if b had value true just before the statement was executed.

Only 5.4% of the students skipped the question. Of those who answered, 60% got it right. And getting this question right turned out to be a predictor of success on most of the rest of the exam, including solving complex problems like reversing a linked list.

To answer this question correctly, a student has to be able to read the code and simulate its execution. They also have to be able to identify the correct answer among the given choices.
[...]
So what do the powerhouse questions have in common? They all involve reading and understanding code. They all test whether students have a proper mental model of program execution. And they involve some of the most central concepts from the first year programming course: logic, recursion and two-dimensional arrays.

The author had the opportunity to present these results to a group of Stanford faculty, including the late Bob Floyd. Floyd, who had taught introductory programming many times, commented that the greatest single predictor he had noticed for success was whether students had a mental model of program execution, whether they could “play computer” in their head. He commented that these questions seemed to be very good at measuring that ability.
[...]
Knuth provides an intriguing intuition about this in talking about the difference between mathematical reasoning and algorithmic thinking:

“The other missing concept that seems to separate mathematicians from computer scientists is related to the ‘assignment operation’ :=, which changes values of quantities. More precisely, I would say that the missing concept is the dynamic notion of the state of a process. ‘How did I get here? What is true now? What should happen next if I’m going to get to the end?’ Changing states of affairs, or snapshots of a computation, seem to be intimately related to algorithms and algorithmic thinking.”

Question 23 is about assignment for a boolean variable that requires thinking about its value before the assignment statement and what value it will have afterwards.

Give me your tired, your poor...doctoral candidates

If you are a PhD student in America, The Economist notes, there's a good chance that your undergraduate degree came from Tsinghua University in China. "That's because Tsinghua and Peking Universities are now the top feeder schools for American PhD programmes":

American students who do have the skills necessary for a quantitative PhD might also be less likely to pursue graduate work, because these skills are in high demand. A clever graduate with strong quantitative skills can fetch a high salary right out of university. The alternative of seven years of indentured servitude to your adviser probably sounds less appealing to many recent graduates.

Students from China do not face such high-paying alternatives at home. Also, now that the number of H2 visas for skilled labour has decreased, PhD programmes provide a path to America for some. This helps explain why the number of foreign students in PhD programmes increased remarkably between 2001 and 2006. After completing their studies, most foreign-born students hope to stay in America.

Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine

This is terrifying. Science Has Become the New Frontier for Title Nine:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

A surprising dose of sanity from the Times:

Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences. They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering. Even though their annual share of doctorates in physics has tripled in recent decades, it’s less than 20 percent. Only 10 percent of physics faculty members are women, a ratio that helped prompt an investigation in 2005 by the American Institute of Physics into the possibility of bias.

But the institute found that women with physics degrees go on to doctorates, teaching jobs and tenure at the same rate that men do. The gender gap is a result of earlier decisions. While girls make up nearly half of high school physics students, they’re less likely than boys to take Advanced Placement courses or go on to a college degree in physics.

These numbers don’t surprise two psychologists at Vanderbilt University, David Lubinski and Camilla Persson Benbow, who have been tracking more than 5,000 mathematically gifted students for 35 years.

They found that starting at age 12, the girls tended to be better rounded than the boys: they had relatively strong verbal skills in addition to math, and they showed more interest in “organic” subjects involving people and other living things. Despite their mathematical prowess, they were less likely than boys to go into physics or engineering.

But whether they grew up to be biologists or sociologists or lawyers, when they were surveyed in their 30s, these women were as content with their careers as their male counterparts. They also made as much money per hour of work. Dr. Lubinski and Dr. Benbow concluded that adolescents’ interests and balance of abilities — not their sex — were the best predictors of whether they would choose an “inorganic” career like physics.

A similar conclusion comes from a new study of the large gender gap in the computer industry by Joshua Rosenbloom and Ronald Ash of the University of Kansas. By administering vocational psychological tests, the researchers found that information technology workers especially enjoyed manipulating objects and machines, whereas workers in other occupations preferred dealing with people.

Once the researchers controlled for that personality variable, the gender gap shrank to statistical insignificance: women who preferred tinkering with inanimate objects were about as likely to go into computer careers as were men with similar personalities. There just happened to be fewer women than men with those preferences.

The death of the yearbook

The Economist notes the death of the yearbook on American college campuses, as social networks like Facebook take over. Of course, what students really need is a printed archive of the "best of" their Facebook network for those four years:

Long after Facebook and MySpace have become obsolete and the electrons dispersed to the ether, future alumni might just wish for the permanence of ink on paper.

Anyway, a one-size-fits-all yearbook might work for a high school class of a few hundred, but it makes little sense for a state university class in the tens of thousands.

Public schools aren't designed to be bad

Public schools aren't designed to be bad, Paul Graham notes; they just seem that way:

There is an idea floating around that public schools are deliberately designed to turn out brainless conformists. I don't believe this. I think public schools are just what you get by default. If you build a giant building out in the suburbs and lock the kids in it during weekdays in the care of a few overworked and mostly uninspired adults, you'll get brainless conformists. You don't need to posit a conspiracy.

I think nearly everything that's wrong in schools can be explained by the lack of any external force pushing them to be good. They don't compete with one another, except in sports (at which they do become good). Parents, though they may choose where to live based on the quality of the schools, never presume to demand more of a given school. College admissions departments, instead of demanding more of high schools, actively compensate for their flaws; they expect less from students from inferior schools, and this is only fair. Standardized tests are explicitly (though unsuccessfully) designed to be a test of aptitude rather than preparation.

Form follows function. Everything evolves into a shape dictated by the demands placed on it. And no one demands more of schools than that they keep kids off the streets till they're old enough for college. So that's what they do. At my school, it was easy not to learn anything, but hard to get out of the building without getting caught.

Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test

Mencius Moldbug likes to call the university system — and the mainstream media, which is full of journalists trained within the system — the Cathedral, because it controls public opinion as effectively as the medieval clerisy.

He also likes to note that NGOs have to put non-governmental in the name; otherwise we'd forget, because they wield plenty of power.

A recent NY Times piece — Big Paycheck or Service? Students Are Put to Test — inadvertently makes it clear how much the university system wants its believers to move into positions of not-quite-governmental power:

A prominent education professor at Harvard has begun leading “reflection” seminars at three highly selective colleges, which he hopes will push undergraduates to think more deeply about the connection between their educations and aspirations.

The professor, Howard Gardner, hopes the seminars will encourage more students to consider public service and other careers beyond the consulting and financial jobs that he says are almost the automatic next step for so many graduates of top colleges.

“Is this what a Harvard education is for?” asked Professor Gardner, who is teaching the seminars at Harvard, Amherst and Colby with colleagues. “Are Ivy League schools simply becoming selecting mechanisms for Wall Street?”

Although others have expressed similar concerns in recent years, his views have gained support on the Harvard campus with students, faculty and even the new president, Drew Gilpin Faust, who made the topic the cornerstone of her address to seniors during commencement week. Dr. Faust noted that in the past year, whenever she has met with students, their first question has always been the same: “Why are so many of us going to Wall Street?”

On other campuses as well, officials are questioning with new vigor whether too many top students who might otherwise turn their talents to a broader array of fields are being lured by high-paying corporate jobs, and whether colleges should do more to encourage students to consider other careers, especially public service.

Don't forget, wielding public power is public service.

Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

I can't say I was an early bird as a child — and I certainly wasn't as a teenager — but orders from my secret superhero commander would definitely have launched me into action at any hour. Wake up, First Sun Warrior of the Morning!

Japanese toy company People has released a new age alarm clock that supposedly helps kids wake up by turning them into Ultraman. It's called the Okiro! Asa Ichiban Taiyou Senshi — Charenjaa Kitto (Wake Up! First Sun Warrior of the Morning — Challenger Kit) and was manufactured for the Japanese Ministry of Education “early to bed early to rise” program. The $38 kit comes with the extravagant eye shield and helmet; a series of talismans and message cards (no doubt world-saving secret missions); and a 27-day program that will involve your child taking orders from "the commander."

The commander wakes the child up at 6 a.m., and prompts players to put on the helmet and hit a "roger" button to acknowledge their wakefulness. Then, they are ordered to count to 10 in five different languages: English, Japanese, German, Swahili and Malagasy. At that point, the player is "allowed to take off the equipment and start the day."

(Hat tip to Tyler Cowen.)

On the Sadness of Higher Education

Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, shares his journey through academia and his thoughts On the Sadness of Higher Education, which has transformed itself radically from his own days as a student in the early 1960s:

Those often kindly teachers, however, do have a sense of urgent mission. Even if we put them on truth-serum, the academics who dominate the humanities and social sciences on our campuses today would state that K-12 education essentially has been one long celebration of America and the West, as if our students were intimately familiar with the Federalist Papers and had never heard of slavery or empire. Having convinced themselves that the students whom they inherit have been immersed in American and Western traditions without critical perspective — they do believe that — contemporary academics see themselves as having merely four brief years in which to demystify students, and somehow to get them to look up from their Madison and Hamilton long enough to gaze upon the darker side of American and Western life. In their view, our K-12 students know all about Aristotle, John Milton and Adam Smith, have studied for twelve years how America created bounty and integrated score after score of millions of immigrants, but have never heard of the Great Depression or segregation.

Academics, in their own minds, face an almost insoluble problem of time. How, in only four years, can they disabuse students of the notion that the capital, risk, productivity and military sacrifice of others have contributed to human dignity and to the prospects of a decent society? How can they make them understand, with only four years to do so, that capitalism and individual- ism have created cultures that are cruel, inefficient, racist, sexist and homophobic, with oppressive caste systems, mental and behavioral? How, in such a brief period, can they enlighten "minorities," including women (the majority of students), about the "internalization" of their oppression (today's equivalent of false consciousness)? How, in only eight semesters, might they use the classroom, curriculum and university in loco parentis to create a radical leadership among what they see as the victim groups of our society, and to make the heirs of successful families uneasy in the moral right of their possessions and opportunities? Given those constraints, why in the world should they complicate their awesome task by hiring anyone who disagrees with them?

Kors argues that the power of universities comes from their monopoly of credentials:

As Richard Vedder so deeply understands in his Going Broke by Degree, they are the only institutions allowed to separate young individuals by IQ and by the ability to complete complex tasks. They do not add value to that, except in technical fields. Recruiters do not pay premiums because of what the Ivy League or the flagship state universities teach in English, history, political science, or sociology. They hire there despite, not because of, that. Recruiters do not pay premiums because our children have been sent to multicultural centers for sensitivity training. Recruiters pay premiums for the value already there, which universities merely identify. So long as recruiters pay premiums, however, it is rational for parents who wish to gain the most options for their children to send them to the university with the most prestigious degree. That will not change in the current scheme.

College is an expensive way of taking an IQ test — but since Griggs v. Duke Power, employers haven't been allowed to use intelligence tests in hiring.

(Hat tip to Richard Fernandez's Belmont Club, at its new location.)

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education

One of Mencius Moldbug's recurring points is that modern progressivism is in fact a form of secular Quakerism, with its doctrine of the Inner Light only slightly modified.

William Deresiewicz, who taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008, inadvertently makes the same point in discussing The Disadvantages of an Elite Education:

One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh more. If I were religious, I would say, God does not love them more. The political implications should be clear. As John Ruskin told an older elite, grabbing what you can get isn’t any less wicked when you grab it with the power of your brains than with the power of your fists. “Work must always be,” Ruskin says, “and captains of work must always be....[But] there is a wide difference between being captains...of work, and taking the profits of it.”

Not Hot for Teachers from Teach for America

The unions are Not Hot for Teachers from Teach for America:

According to truly independent studies done by the Urban Institute, "On average, high school students taught by the Teach for America corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers' effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with three or more years of experience."

So what does the unionized education establishment do when confronted with such good news? They only hire 3,700 of the 25,000 applicants who want to truly help kids. They badmouth the TFA program, and with their friends in the Democratic Party, who fear an educated electorate, put up barriers to such competition for their entrenched jobs.

Naming a Univeristy of Chicago research center after Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman has upset some of the faculty

The self-satire is almost too much. Naming a Univeristy of Chicago research center after Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman has upset some of the faculty:

In a letter to U. of C. President Robert Zimmer, 101 professors — about 8 percent of the university's full-time faculty — said they feared that having a center named after the conservative, free-market economist could "reinforce among the public a perception that the university's faculty lacks intellectual and ideological diversity."

You see, the largely progressive faculty "fear" that naming the center after a "conservative" economist would imply a lack of intellectual and ideological diversity. It's almost as if diversity doesn't mean diversity...

Schools, Skills, and Synapses

James J. Heckman makes 15 points in his Schools, Skills, and Synapses (PDF):

1. Many major economic and social problems such as crime, teenage pregnancy, dropping out of high school and adverse health conditions are linked to low levels of skill and ability in society.


2. In analyzing policies that foster skills and abilities, society should recognize the multiplicity of human abilities.


3. Currently, public policy in the U.S. focuses on promoting and measuring cognitive ability through IQ and achievement tests. The accountability standards in the No Child Left Behind Act concentrate attention on achievement test scores and do not evaluate important noncognitive factors that promote success in school and life.


4. Cognitive abilities are important determinants of socioeconomic success.


5. So are socioemotional skills, physical and mental health, perseverance, attention, motivation, and self confidence. They contribute to performance in society at large and even help determine scores on the very tests that are commonly used to measure cognitive achievement.


6. Ability gaps between the advantaged and disadvantaged open up early in the lives of children.


7. Family environments of young children are major predictors of cognitive and socioemotional abilities, as well as a variety of outcomes such as crime and health.


8. Family environments in the U.S. and many other countries around the world have deteriorated over the past 40 years.


9. Experimental evidence on the positive effects of early interventions on children in disadvantaged families is consistent with a large body of non-experimental evidence showing that the absence of supportive family environments harms child outcomes.


10. If society intervenes early enough, it can improve cognitive and socioemotional abilities and the health of disadvantaged children.


11. Early interventions promote schooling, reduce crime, foster workforce productivity and reduce teenage pregnancy.
    


12. These interventions are estimated to have high benefit-cost ratios and rates of return.


13. As programs are currently configured, interventions early in the life cycle of disadvantaged children have much higher economic returns than later interventions such as reduced pupil-teacher ratios, public job training, convict rehabilitation programs, adult literacy programs, tuition subsidies or expenditure on police.


14. Life cycle skill formation is dynamic in nature. Skill begets skill; motivation begets motivation. Motivation cross-fosters skill and skill cross-fosters motivation. If a child is not motivated to learn and engage early on in life, the more likely it is that when the child becomes an adult, it will fail in social and economic life. The longer society waits to intervene in the life cycle of a disadvantaged child, the more costly it is to remediate disadvantage.


15. A major refocus of policy is required to capitalize on knowledge about the life cycle of skill and health formation and the importance of the early years in creating inequality in America, and in producing skills for the workforce.

Arnold Kling says that "Heckman is one of the most careful researchers on the topic, and this paper is an outstanding summary of his findings." He emphasizes a few points:

An important inference to draw from the paper is that trying to reduce economic inequality by, say, subsidizing more young people to go to college, is likely to be very ineffective. Even interventions at the primary school level are mostly too late.
[...]
One of Heckman's themes is that while IQ is difficult to change with intervention, it is possible to affect what he calls socioemotional skills, and those in turn will affect performance on test scores and overall achievement.

High School Students With A Delayed School Start Time Sleep Longer, Report Less Daytime Sleepiness

I have never understood why high school should start hours earlier than an ordinary work day. I certainly never liked it. Now scientists have found that high school students with a delayed school start time sleep longer and report less daytime sleepiness:

The study, authored by Zaw W. Htwe, MD, of Norwalk Hospital's Sleep Disorders Center in Norwalk, Conn., focused on 259 high school students who completed the condensed School Sleep Habits Questionnaire. Prior to the delay, students reported sleeping a mean of 422 minutes (7.03 hours) per school night, with a mean bed-time of 10:52 p.m. and a mean wake-up time as 6:12 a.m.

According to the results, after a 40-minute delay in the school start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:15 a.m., students slept significantly longer on school nights. Total sleep time on school nights increased 33 minutes, which was due mainly to a later rise time. These changes were consistent across all age groups. Students' bedtime on school nights was marginally later, and weekend night sleep time decreased slightly. More students reported "no problem" with sleepiness after the schedule change.

"Following a 40-minute delay in start time, the students utilized 83 percent of the extra time for sleep. This increase in sleep time came as a result of being able to 'sleep in' to 6:53 a.m., with little delay in their reported school night bedtime. This study demonstrates that students given the opportunity to sleep longer, will, rather than extend their wake activities on school nights," said Mary B. O'Malley, MD, PhD, corresponding author of the study.

The Mismatch Problem

In his speech at the recent New Yorker conference, Malcolm Gladwell explains the mismatch between the metrics we use to assess potential new hires and new hires' actual performance on the job. (This is the subject of his upcoming book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't.)

If we look at professional-sport combines, teacher credentials, and law-school applications, they have zero predictive capacity. The best quarterbacks score the worst on the IQ test given to quarterbacks, teachers with additional training and credentials teach no better than other teachers, and lawyers who get into a prestigious law school via affirmative action do just as well in their career as higher-scoring lawyers.

But I think he misses — or skirts — the issue of why these predictive metrics aren't very predictive. It's not simply that hard, objective criteria are bad. If you have a set of physical metrics that predict athletic performance in the population at large — height, weight, vertical leap, etc. — they won't predict performance in a tiny sample of athletes who have already been selected for a particular level of performance. In the case of athletes at a combine, of course, these are athletes in the top fraction of a percent of players, but the same thing would presumably happen if we looked only at players between the 50th and 51st percentile.

In the case of teachers, the issue is that the training and credentialing have never been intended to improve teaching performance. The credentials are there to keep out competition. It is a highly unionized profession, after all.

A bigger issue in Gladwell's analysis though — at least as far as I can tell from his short speech, which is just a summary — is how he defines good and bad teachers. Apparently he defines good teachers as those whose students